


Too Much is Never Enough

by CancerConstellation



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Anxiety Disorder, Beowulf references, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mommy Issues, Neurodivergent Newton Geiszler, Nosebleeds, Opera music, Pining, a lot of stream of consciousness babble, ghostly images??, gratuitous mentions of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, happy ending !, light angst ?, questioning self-identity, study in the post-drift mind, stumbling around the shatterdome
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-08-05 23:39:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16377242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CancerConstellation/pseuds/CancerConstellation
Summary: Hermann, ever predictable and safe Hermann, frowns at him with faux derision but does carefully lower himself to sit beside Newt. If Newt reaches out, places clumsy helping hands, it’s in the misting hours and those are not hours for words—so they will not speak on it. I’m never going to be able to not touch him, Newt thinks, deliriously. I’ll die, if I don’t touch him. Because there is no quiet—no quiet to Monica’s notes like five hundred drunkenly thrown darts, and no quiet to the manic frenzy of his mind, hands shaking because the meds make him fuzzy and saving the world means he needs an alert mind, and no quiet with Hermann who finds him too loud, and too much, and everything, everything he has left after this is all over. I’ll die, his mind repeats, helpfully.





	1. Seascape; no escape

**Author's Note:**

> I began this like.... maybe a year or two ago in a fevered 3am post-dream haze and it definitely shows in the writing...  
> That said, I thought it mimicked what the post-drift experience might be like and how these two might navigate that mindscape !  
> It starts off heavy, but they'll find their way. Come find me on tumblr @ SkepticAmoeba.tumblr.com and yell at me or send me very nice things if you wish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _This chapter was entirely inspired by and written to the tunes of Bob Moses’ music… namely: Before I Fall, All I Want, Grace, I Ain’t Gonna Be The First, Talk, Touch And Go, and Too Much Is Never Enough (after which the fic is named)_

It begins, as most things in Newt’s life do, with a tragedy.

She’s performing—Turandot with the long glimmering gowns and the lovers beheaded. He’s not there, stopped going when he could manage it, when he could see that his post-show rush to the _camerino_ was more a nuisance than a token pleasure to be kept in mind while on stage. He’s not there, but he can nearly hear the music, the crescendoing voices howling in the night wind that tugs viciously at his hair. Here, braced against the sea-side railing of the Shatterdome, he does not expect to find peace. There is no quiet—anywhere. Not in the lab, not in the mess hall, not in the mounting pressure of crowded hallways, not in his head, not from his _mouth_ —.

The sea churns below him—five warm spotlights drawing five different long shadows across the stage as she swivels and the dress billows before trailing behind her, the silhouette of a lover, the bloodied pike, a bridge, a pool of water, the orchestra pit and the conductor’s sweat gleaming in the low-light—it doesn’t smell the way it used to. That’s what years of acidic blood, sweat (do Kaiju sweat? How is it he’s never thought, never considered such a thing?), saliva and nuclear waste will do. And the rains are black when they come, and they sting, and corrode—look at how they’ve left us, those meandering beasts. Like twilight they appear through the mist, hulking and large and _almost_ a vision. Grendel with the bared teeth and the bright eyes in the darkest of nights—and the solo rises high over the tempest on a note so sharp it punctures a lung, leaves him scrabbling for breath, inhaling noxious sea-salt like a heady drug. There are no lights on—the electrostatic buzz-hum that lets him know there is a short somewhere is silent. The room is lit with candles only and the low murmurations—his mother, warbler of words and her shawl scratches at the back of his neck where his hair has been sheared short at the back (he was cold, so cold and hands slightly shaking but he _knew the words_.)  “ _Mazal tov un simon tov!”_ Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and counting and the beds he’s known, _gods_ —the _drinks_ he’s known and the intimate grooves between each bathroom floor tile. Green speckled, wood panel, periwinkle blue. Toilet bowl plastic or porcelain, lit up in nightlight or jammed against his knee as he fumbles in the dark—coffee haze and post-fuck quiet and the quiet, and the quiet, and the _damnable silence of being alone_. And the warm body next to his, words pressed into skin but still so singular. Swift dismissal and the _‘Call you later!’_ s and the empty contacts in the phone—aching pain.

 Newt reaches down between rocketing breaths to rub at his knee. His eye hurts so _fucking_ much and there’s this growl that’s growing into something inhuman inside him except it’s not a growl—it’s the raging impulse to crawl down the coast line, drag his damp and plated stomach over city-buildings—startled businessmen still punching in late-night hours and him all teeth and eye and curious tentacle crushing because he _can_ , because it feels _right_. This body does not fit him—too small; he is outgrowing his skin, he has too few legs—too few eyes. And everything is blue. Blue smell, blue stark on yellow safety gloves, blue cardigan—sounds blue, an aria on the weeping sludge that’s steadily climbed its way up the shore for the past eight years. Tastes blue in his mouth, tacky pill—chalk like—like the pointed, purpose-filled, rhythmic jot-down of Hermann in his too-blue cardigan. Rhythmic because Newt is arrhythmic like disjointed Legos that for some reason won’t follow the instructions booklet (they don’t _fit_ , they don’t fit and they should fit, they _have_ to fit because they were _made_ to fit). Awkward and cluttered and just short of eureka until standing in the bay, looking at Striker and thinking Eureka—to drift, drift—drift into blue and _noise_ and so many bodies and finally he is not alone, gods, no, he is so very, very, not-alone. Jumping on the floor, body jolting so goddamn hard he tastes blood in the inside of his mouth where there was nobody to pin his tongue flat. Body jolting so goddamn hard it’s like the whipping electricity—buzz of a short somewhere in this cold, cold house—like the neon shift and thrum below the skin as he towers in the mist, looking down at these creatures—purposeless. He is filled with purpose—to demolish. And that is what he was born to do. And that is what he will do.

But first he will sit, legs dangling from the balcony where the bars permit it, and he will stare out at the decimated landscape, and he will rub at his knee, and he will think on Russians, and Australians, and Chinese, and vaguely larger-than-life British men. And even further back than that, he will think on the others before. He knocks his heels against the concrete, reverberations jolting him like a tide—swill, dark, and the dark, dark of Tendo’s eyes as he’d handed it over.

“Drink, man, to them,” he’d said, rehearsed and hollow and his bowtie had been out of place, but not artfully, not on purpose. And when Newt drank it was like blue in his mouth, on his teeth, sticking to his palate because he’s been irreversibly stained. Maybe he’s always been stained—a rock-star.

Then, there’s Hermann. Hermann—fastidious bastard so terse and unmoving in conviction. He looks young with age, lines weary but he is so small and how has he not noticed Hermann’s so small before? Do kaiju sweat? Late observations—Newt laughs. Hermann who only ever wanted to see stars—who wrote poetics in his notebooks about numbers and with numbers and in code—swooping lines of literature emblazoning the back of his eyelids.

Hermann stands, bathed in the pink lowlight with his cane at his side but he’s barely leaning on it. Newt knows it hurts, because his fucking knee feels like it’s going to give out any second and he’s not even standing.

When Hermann looks at him, it precedes any words—not yet—but there is no quiet. Not here, not with Hermann, not with himself.

“Sit,” Newt says because Hermann’s not feeling it, but he will tomorrow once the adrenaline and the hallucinations and the chatter and the post-drift ghosting wear off. Newt feels like he’s been torn into five different entities. One moment his skin’s too big, too accommodating and the next it’s too small and he feels like he needs to peel out of the seams—lizard skins in his wake.

“Come on, Herms, sit,” he repeats, flashing him his best rock-star-patented grin if only because he knows (now) that despite any frown, Hermann finds it endearing—heart-frenzy-ing—Newt will find time to be flattered later.

Hermann, ever predictable and _safe_ Hermann, frowns at him with faux derision but does carefully lower himself to sit beside Newt. If Newt reaches out, places clumsy helping hands, it’s in the misting hours and those are not hours for words—so they will not speak on it. _I’m never going to be able to not touch him_ , Newt thinks, deliriously. _I’ll die, if I don’t touch him._ Because there is no quiet—no quiet to Monica’s notes like five hundred drunkenly thrown darts, and no quiet to the manic frenzy of his mind, hands shaking because the meds make him fuzzy and saving the world means he needs an alert mind, and no quiet with Hermann who finds him too loud, and too much, and everything, _everything_ he has left after this is all over. _I’ll die_ , his mind repeats, helpfully. 

“You won’t die,” Hermann says and Newt wonders if he said it out loud; if it’s something that merits being voiced into the early-morning haze where the stars still blink their light from billions and trillions of miles away—long gone impressions like the ghosting sensation of being one large, disfigured creature. Half-man, half-beast—a thing of knobby knees and claws and words like tumbleweeds. Of being, and not-being Hermann. Of being, and not-being Kaiju.

“You can’t die now. Not after-.” He doesn’t finish. Newt understands anyway, or he thinks he does. Not after all the people that have died already. Not after I found you seizing on the floor like some _fool_. Not after we’re finally rock-stars. That growl Newt’s been nursing turns into a humorless laugh—more of a bark unable to lose that razor-sharp edge.

“You got it, dude. No dying. Not today.” _As long as I have him here, at my side, someone that knows, someone that’s seen, I won’t die._ His hand is a spot of warmth where it slides down the rough fabric of the parka—terribly ugly thing, despite its comfort merits—and comes to stop on Hermann’s thigh. Hermann looks at it, doesn’t move to remove it or curl over it with his own. His hands are between his legs.

Hermann is all warm light and eyelashes so transparent it’s like they’re barely there when he blinks against a gust of wind. He’s not a pretty man by any means—coarse and unforgiving in the most stubborn-headed of ways, and Newt’s not particularly given to platitudes, perhaps especially when it comes to Hermann, but Hermann glows in the dawn. He glows more acidic than any kaiju blue—corrodes him where his hand rests on his thigh—a weight and an assurance.

He’s scared Hermann will leave him, will consume him, will look at him with those dark, dark eyes and he won’t offer him any drink for consolation—he’ll leave Newt wanting because that is what he’s done for the past fuck-ton of years. And because Hermann is safe, as safe as an ember, as safe as the toxic levels in this crashing surf that keeps brushing up against their soles, and because Hermann is predictable—what was it he called them? Events?—Newt knows that Hermann will look at him, will see the blood smeared under his nose, still quite metal in his mouth, and he will give Newt no consolation. They will sit in this stifling silence that has no quiet. With the surf. And the sea. And the things that lurk—lurked— _lurk_ , in his mind, in their minds, they still swim the Pacific, under the waves.


	2. Nightwalker; Davy Jone’s locker

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Written to Glass Animal (Youth, Pools, Woozy), Zola Blood (Good Love), Crooked Colours (Flow), and Alt-J (Adeline)_

Betta fish, it is said, can comfortably live in small glass bowls. As a child he’d had two and put them side-by-side as the pet store owner had suggested. Fighter fish; Newt never saw it that way. Over-enthusiasm, perhaps—he liked them. One battered itself against the glass so hard it tore its fins. What kind of desperation or instinct drives a creature to battering against a known barrier? 

His walls are unforgiving, daunting, and they lean in on him as if all bending down to let him in on some terrible conspiracy that revolves around him at the very root of it. He’s never been good with small spaces and these rooms are like tiny shipping crates. This bed is unfamiliar. He’s spent more time on the well-worn sofa in the lab than on it.

Hermann had picked him up with tired eyes—the one ringed in red so telling of a violence inflicted upon the body, of the neural load that was almost too much for the two of them, much less Newt. Hip creaking with a deep-seated gnawing pain, he’d picked him up with soft words. 

“Come on, Newton. We can’t stay out here forever,” he’d said quietly, curls of the tongue that were all the hint of cashmere hidden by the parka. The faux fur had smelled mildewed but had been soft all the same as it rubbed against Newt’s face.

It’s seven in the morning and he’s in his room unable to sleep because there are screams lodged in his throat, echoing in his ears, but there’s no sound aside from the steady thrumming of the Dome. Life goes on. The to-and-fro of technicians, engineers, pilots—weary scientists, even—just beyond the hermetically sealed door. Muted sounds like being underwater—a dull throb. Once, back in California, he’d gone to the beach with friends and had floated on his stomach. Rather than see cloud cover, he’d opened his eyes into gritty, stinging salt and there had been an un-still stillness. Rocking and buoyed in the white noise and the pain of ocean water, Newt had found his in-between place; had barely remembered to breathe. There are no phantom waves to rock him to sleep, no skin-deep heat to keep him fevered through the night and saltine despite a good shower, and yet there is an in-betweenness. It is unlike and like that time—there is no peace here. He stretches his arm out against the starchy, military-grade linens and rests his hand, palm up, in the empty space at his side. He is reaching for something, in his mind and here in his room. He is hoping against hope, against his myopic eyes, that he will brush up against warm skin.

“Stay,” he’d said, turning to Hermann at the door jamb, voice stuck in that revealing space that was all teeth or violence. He needed that—a tether—because soon he knew he would claw himself from this, this body and dig foundation-deep scratches into the wall. No saltwater and his eye hurting so much—so much worse than that. Hermann, wordless, was worse than any spastic suspicion of self. Defeated—both of them. Too defeated for arguments.

Hermann didn’t stay. Newt didn’t beg.

Didn’t say, _If you leave, I might not wake_ , because you don’t say those things to odious lab partners that put up with you out of a misplaced sense of camaraderie and a poorly hidden appreciation for your intellect. As a matter of fact, Newt doesn’t say pleading things like this at all—not serious ones.

“If I go rogue it’s your fault!” He said instead, high and tinny with just the barest of frantic and covering laughs, to Hermann’s retreating form. He’s laughed more in the short space since they cancelled the apocalypse than he can remember. All of them sound nervous. Faked. Disbelieving.

The beach—remember, he is still in his room, thinking of floating face-down—had been a divided one: _Mar Muerto; Mar Vivo_. Lively Sea, Dead Sea. He’d floated in the dead one, water’s calm with barely a turbulence. They say the Lively Sea has a particular taste for the unsuspecting—undertow sweeps them to crash against jagged rock so quick the water floods the nasal cavity and there is no breath and no purchase because the sand comes away in raking hands, water pretzelling each victim. There is a lively sea out there and inside him. The cough he wracks up staggers him and he’s inhaling so much formaldehyde, years and years of it, that he thinks if he could muster tears he would leak formaldehyde.

Hermann didn’t turn; a heavy handed push of door knob and a hasty retreat. Newt wonders if this itching sensation to tear into flesh—not to devour, but to possess, to bend it to submission, to show how big, how careless he can be because small things are of little significance—he wonders if Hermann hears this, feels this under his layers and layers of clothes. How? How is he not cloyed? How to not scream? He will get no answers from him, not yet, if ever. How to predict the probability that Newt will, effectively go through some Kafka-esque metamorphosis in the next few hours? When will the corrugated flesh surface like wisdom teeth? He knows, without a doubt, that the first person he would seek out is Hermann because if it were anyone’s fault it’s his. If there’s anyone that would understand, know what to do, it would be Hermann.

He has not died; he is not touching Hermann anywhere other than in mind and memory. Newt feels numbers and sifts through them like batting at diaphanous curtains—he knows Haydn and Liszt—knows calluses and blisters on his palm from years of using a cane. He has not died, and Hermann is not here, and the sheets are a rough drag against the back of his hand, and the barely-restrained scream knotted and gnarled in his throat is speeding to the breach. The Pacific is his mouth, a turbulent place. If he opens it, even to sigh, to _breathe_ , it’ll all come out in an ugly tumorous mess of heaving petrification. _I’ll die, I’ll die_. It echoes. The Grand Canyon had been underwhelming until he whooped and it echoed so loud that surely, it’s still resonating even now. _I’ll die_. If he screams no one will hear. These rooms are deathtraps with their re-inforced walls. If he Gregory Samsa’s it, he’ll scratch the walls, beg for exit until he’s crashing through the barriers with the drive to plow the land, raze it clean, exterminate. He thrashes restlessly in the bed, sheets tangled in his legs. He’s stuck in that in-between place and he’s entirely land-locked. So much restless energy crackles inside him that he eyes the scissors on his desk. His hair is getting long. He could trim it; dye it; shear it all off. He could start a fire in the room; burn all of the complaints Hermann’s sent to HR. He could tear the sheets until they’re threadbare. He could dismantle his desk screw by screw. He could, he could, he _could_. He’s done it all before.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been so busy with art and other responsibilities, but I promise this is still being worked on!

Sleep—the bond is a tender thing. Pilots don’t talk about how it’s like a live-wire lanced right through your cerebral cortex. It _hurts_ to dwell on—like there’s a bruise in his head. He’s pretty sure he has no internal bleeding (well, he does have these nosebleeds, so maybe he does), and that this is some other metaphysical thing that Hermann would no-doubt explain in detail, but he’s asleep. Newt has not been afforded this luxury.

He walks because he can’t sleep. He walks because if he doesn’t he’s sure that whatever thing that currently resides in the hollow space below his sternum will pull his tongue back down his throat, gut him from the insides out until he is bleeding and spilling and it’s all blue—blue burning his eye. He’s not the only one. Hollow-eyed rangers walk slow and blank looks meet across the way and there is understanding but unrecognized because they are not, cannot possibly be, becoming unhinged. Newt hasn’t smoked in a long time because cigarettes had become a rare treat sometime after the third year of the Impending Apocalypse. Not enough downtime to sneak one in, anyway. He hasn’t craved them for a long time. His fingers twitch at his sides now, unoccupied and still nicotine-stained after years of use. He wonders if they will ever be less yellow, nails less bitten down into the quick. He walks and he doesn’t talk or breathe through his mouth because then he’ll be crying, or screaming, or, worse, the entity will gurgle up from inside him in insidious twists and he won’t be able to gain control again.

The hallways are lit at less than fifty percent and Newt is a shroud with sea-legs. Unsteadily wobbling as siren song floats down the corridors and makes his head ring, he feels at the condensation pearling the walls. There she is again, mezzo-soprano canting each octave into luxurious melody with more passion than she can spare for anything else.

“ _It is like she makes love with her voice_ ,” his father had said, a soft wrinkle of the mouth and a far-away look in his eyes. “ _She took me to bed and all I wanted was for her to sing that night’s aria to me over and over again. I didn’t even have to touch her—I just wanted to listen.”_

Newt hums along to Il Trovatore and it echoes, intertwines with the echo already inhabiting the corridor. The presence must not like Verdi because the weight in his chest with the barbs doesn’t promise to regurgitate itself. He can almost, almost taste himself again in the chapped lips. His leg still drags a bit and he finds himself reaching up to feel at the short hair at the back of his head, only to find every lock perfectly intact.

Nightwalker; punk-rocker; sweet-talker; heartbreaker; all-around-genius Newt Geiszler.

Where does one go from here? He’s peaked in the most incredible way—and he stared into the literal maw of the beast not once but _twice_. Where to go, beyond these steel beams and the power failures, and these byzantine hallways that thread through the complex like a labyrinth. He is the minotaur in this witching hour—blood-borne beast. How did that end, again?

The lights flicker, generator making a choking sound that clunks through the whole building. _Mio povero ragazzo_ , ‘my poor boy’ and soft, disinterested hands carding through his hair. He wants to sleep. He could sleep like this, with his head pressed against the cool and unwelcoming walls and the corridors like chasms where he is the lone haunt. He could sleep here, and when he woke there would be hands carding through his hair and the music of the world to keep him company.


	4. Chapter 4

Tendo is a ghost; pale and with dark circles under his eyes.

Newt tells him as much and gets a very expressive ‘fuck you’ in return. He might deserve it, a bit. After all, it’s Tendo that’s found him standing in the hallway with his head against the cool walls, looking at nothing and at everything and probing the live-wire that’s a trigger to a minefield. Tendo with his dark, dark eyes and even darker coffee. Tendo with his hair made a mess, loose from mousse, grabs him by the arm and steers him back to the dorms. He doesn’t know why Tendo is still up, or _how_ , but he feels marginally relieved that he’s not the only one up on a haunt. Only Hermann would truly understand this itching, burning epidermal discomfort—the in-betweenness. Maybe even he wouldn’t. Maybe he really did go and mess up his mind for good with that first drift and he wouldn't wish being fucked up on anyone in the world, not like this, but the isolation in the thought is enough to make his eyes burn.

He steals Tendo’s coffee for the quickest second but doesn’t manage to get a sip in before it’s being swiped away again.

“Oh, no, buddy. No coffee for you. You need to sleep.” He does. He _does_ need sleep, but he _can’t._ Tendo leaves him at his bedroom door. Newt looks across the way at Hermann’s door. Hermann had not wanted to stay, which is fine, and Newt is not actually dead.

Newt goes to the only place he’d found peace in noise: the lab. It’s eerie to be walking through the Shatterdome when it’s so dark and there’s no one out. The lab is deserted, as it should be since it’s total occupants amount to two and one of them’s sleeping. Everything’s still out, the discarded pons headset, whatever specimen he’d been working on before things took a turn for the better, or worse, the scalpel—he hadn’t even taken the time to clean his gloves. The acrid smell of blue has filled the room in the meantime. It should scare him that that’s a comfort. Should not soothe him. He stands in the doorway, the only light coming from the phosphorescent tanks of floating kaiju parts. A yellow pallor draws the room, chalk dust settles subtly under the smell of blue and chemical.

A jumper—the same too-blue of the cardigan—is draped across the back of Hermann’s swivel chair. Newt is cold, and he knows it will fit because Hermann always buys oversized clothes that hang off his frame not unlike a coat hanger doing its job. He slips it on. It is also chalky, but the draft that’s followed him hangs back, put off, irritated by his daring move. He laughs too loud in the stillness. Personifying temperature—that’s a new one. Newt tugs the throw blanket on the sofa over him.

 _I might not wake_ , he thinks to the unresponsive ceiling. But he thinks he will, because this is Hermann’s jumper, and that has to count for something, right? The calculations hulk over him in all their impressive stature and he can feel the weight of their gaze even as the undertow drags him to sharp rock face and he's tumbling into restless, fitful swirls of black, blue (always blue), and Chamomile tea.


	5. Set adrift; no relief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written to James Young (Stoned On You), Khalid (Coaster, Saved, Location), Kimbra (Old Flame, Plain Gold Ring), and Lana del Rey (Music to Watch Boys to)
> 
> Double update this time, because I felt too excited about this chapter.

“Zurückkommen, _come back_ , Newton.”

The lighthouse’s sweeping lantern rakes over him through the mist. He can hear the fog-horn loud and steady with warmth as it soars, bassoon-like into the night. His hands against the cold rails—the brine wafting up and the spray of waves against his knuckles. Wind stings his cheeks to red—a hand at the small of his back. He can’t see the shore, but the lantern is there, turning dutifully.

_Das ist es, klein—That’s it, little one._ _This one is called Do and it is like the beginning of a sentence_. The men’s immaculate white shirts are rolled up to their elbows as they lean into the belly of the polished beast. Mutti sits next to him on the bench, delicate wrists arching over the keys and testing each one to see if they are tuned. Newt looks at her and she bumps his shoulder with her elbow playfully. _Was willst du sagen—what do you wish to say?_ He doesn’t know; he tells her so. And then she plays, and it is everything he ever wanted to say.

Newt is back on the boat and he can see the large sea cliff finally, dark and imposing. There is too much fog to see the stars tonight. The star chart under his arm flaps in the wind, is torn from its hold and swims out into the night sky. Desperation—cold in his chest as a sound is ripped from him and he is climbing the rails. The hand on his back moves to grab him, stop him. He is leaping—cold water—dark all around—and the chart somewhere. Where? _Where?_ He stills when the water starts to glow blue and phosphorescent as something moves towards him under the water. “Newton, wake _up!_ ”

Newt wakes heaving, panting and sitting up so fast it leaves him dizzy. His hands shoot out for purchase in the cold lab and the first thing they find are the lapels of Hermann’s laughable pajamas. He’s trembling—so cold up north with dark waters.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts out between them where they are breathing. It must not be comfortable, the angle at which Hermann’s tilted, nearly spilling into the couch but somehow still on his feet. A wet gasp like breaking through the surface tension and bobbing in unending black—iron in his mouth. He’s started to bleed again in his sleep.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats and it is more a burble with a lisp on the ‘s’ that sends droplets freckling another one of Hermann’s ugly sweaters—and he is _touching_ Hermann again, hands moving up the heavy flannel to cup his face, curl fingers around the back of his neck. The lights are still off and Hermann’s face is drawn in shadows as his hand still rests on Newt’s cheek, as if he’d just been prepared to smack him into sensibility.

“I’m sorry.” He keeps repeating it into the space between them. He doesn’t think he’s ever said ‘sorry’ to Hermann before. His thumbs rub across the small hairs at the nape of Hermann’s neck, his vision still swimming, his feet are kicking to try to keep his head afloat.

“Whatever for?” Hermann asks in the in-between: not quite leaning in or pulling back. He has a half-frown, mouth tugging down in that singularly confused way of his. His other hand is on Newt’s bicep, also poised for shaking him to wakefulness. He must feel the tremors. His eyes are luminous in the yellow light and he must have showered because he smells of the PPDC-issued plain soap and nothing like kaiju viscera or blood. _Light_. So pale, he is a light and there is no sunrise to make him seem so. 

“For the, uh, boat,” Newt answers, hands slowly untangling, drifting to Hermann’s shoulders and lingering for a moment when he flinches before he shifts and makes space for Hermann to sit. Shoulder to thigh, they press together. “You don’t have to talk about it. I was—I was there.” He’s not sure that all of it was real, certainly, Monica is his own machination—piano lessons that were never about learning, only about showing Newt he would always be left behind—but the creature skimming the surface with its neon eyeball focused on Newt cannot possibly be real. Hermann was too young. Those monsters belonged to the future at that point.

Hermann doesn’t say anything but he’s looking at Newt with steady intent. Newt frowns, pinching the bridge of his nose and tilting his head back while smearing the blood away and sniffing. “‘M cold,” he mutters.

“You’re wearing my jumper,” Hermann points out wryly and, yeah, that’s right, he is. He wrinkles his nose, sending a new torrent down. It’s small comfort to see that Hermann’s hair is disheveled, like he was in a hurry to get to Newt. He’s not the only mess in the room, it seems, but Hermann is still more put-together.

“Worüber denkst du?— _What are you thinking of?_ ” Hermann asks, low and quiet. They’ve sat together like this many times before but never in the odd half-light or with a chord strung between them tuned so taut that at the mere touch it could snap. Hermann’s using his ‘Newt’s-made-of-glass’ voice. Honed after too many panic attacks. Newt resents how effective it is. Resents it not because he doesn’t care for the treatment, rather, because it’s Hermann. And the voice does things to him. Things he’s put out of mind.

“Can’t you tell?” _You, of course_. _The kaiju_. _Cold_. _My knee hurts_. His head hurts too, but maybe it’s because of how much he’s been bleeding. It wouldn’t come as a surprise.

“Of course I can’t tell,” Hermann snarks, rolling his ‘r’s with the German inflection that comes out when he’s irritated, or exasperated. Despite it all, Newt smiles. That’s better.  

“What now?” Newt asks the room, himself, the breach, Hermann. No answer.

“What now?” He repeats, wanting an answer, but he doesn’t wait long enough to get it. “Let’s get out of here, Herms. Let’s go see the world before we become Dr. Geiszler and Dr. Gottlieb again.”

He’s always wanted to go to Peru—maybe visit the Hansen homeland. He’s sure he can do worse than giant spiders. Hermann could go visit the giant radio telescope or whatever it is that catches his interest after finding aliens coming from the sea, rather than the sky. _Let’s go where there’s so much blue I can’t breathe—let’s go where I don’t feel like five different people_. _Let's go where the horizon is an unending line of lion grass bobbing in the breeze and we're completely, utterly alone with each other._

“Let’s be rock-stars for a while. Take a tour.” He grins and leans onto Hermann’s shoulder with more weight.

Hermann shoves at him with a scoff, but there’s no fire behind it. “Well, before you become a rock-star, you would do well to engage in a friendly session with a shower,” he drawls, disapproval dripping from his voice as he stares at Newt down the long length of his nose. Newt laughs and nods.

“Alright, it’s a deal.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> This chapter was entirely inspired by and written to the tunes of Bob Moses’ music… namely: Before I Fall, All I Want, Grace, I Ain’t Gonna Be The First, Talk, Touch And Go, and Too Much Is Never Enough (after which the fic is named)


End file.
